Double standards

Browsing StyleGala this afternoon, I spotted a link to an article about the rise of awareness in corporate Britain of the need for accessible websites. 'Great news' I thought, clicking the link and reading the article. It basically seemed to be a bit of PR for some company called Tridion (can't say I'd ever heard of them), who make content management software for large corporations and have partnered with Reading Room, who are going to use Tridion's latest stuff to make accessible sites. That's all spiffy, but I searched for Tridion's site to see what it was they were doing to make these marvelous accessible websites and found a website done partially in tables, that fails the Section 508 and WAI accessibility tests. I can only hope it's Reading Room that have the accessibility expertise and that they're just relying on Tridion for the back-end stuff. Why am I picking on these people? I realise this post might seem a bit harsh, singling out a company when there are plenty doing far worse, but from what I can see they've decided to put themselves out there as people making these great accessible websites for organisations like Christian Aid. That's fine - PR is PR and I have no problem getting a bit of free publicity by providing comments on new regulation/standards (the apparent initial point of the article) - but if you're going to do it, at least cover the bases. If you're going to announce to the world this great new partnership making accessible websites, make damn sure your own website passes basic accessibility tests (working properly in more than Internet Explorer would help too). There seem to be plenty of people claiming standards-compliant, accessible design these days while not actually quite living up to it. Just yesterday I read a post on 456 Berea Street about how 71.8% of CSS Reboot participants failed XHTML or CSS validation (or both). For an event meant to showcase standards-based design that's pretty poor (though to be fair to the organisers, it's not something they canreally control until the launches happen and even then it'd be a LOT of work to go weeding out any and all non-compliant sites). It's not always possible to adhere 100% to standards, especially as the standards aren't always cut and dried, but stuff like avoiding table-based layout and providing alt tags for images are a seriously low entry point that many still aren't managing. Rant over :D